


To Set Aside Childish Things

by matchsticks_p (matchsticks)



Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Yuletide 2015, creepy toys, references to canonical child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:07:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the helicopter crash intended to kill them all, neither Jensen nor Cougar are coping too well.</p><p>And then Cougar starts bringing things home from the toy factory...</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Set Aside Childish Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sphinxvictorian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sphinxvictorian/gifts).



On Monday through Friday, they work at the toy factory for ten hours with no breaks and they crash as soon as they get home. On Saturday mornings, they give 475 bolivianos to the dead-eyed old matriarch who owns the room they sleep in, and on Saturday nights they take whatever is left of their money to drink with Pooch, Roque, and Clay if they're all getting along at the moment, or with just Pooch if Roque and Clay are fighting about a woman. On Sundays they nurse their hangovers. On Monday they do it all over again.

It's not even close to the worst way they've had to live, but this time there's no end to it that they can picture. They're not killing time before an extraction date, they're not waiting for a rescue—they're not even looking for the sweet release of death, because for all intents and purposes they're already dead.

Well, Jensen assumes "they." He can really only speak for himself if he's honest, but Cougar's never said much and he always seemed happy enough to let Jensen speak for him too. These days he talks even less, and Jensen can't help but double his chatter to make up for it.

Their landlady calls him _el fastidioso_ because she thinks he doesn't understand Spanish, but as long as Cougar doesn't think he's annoying, Jensen's going to keep right on doing what he's doing, because he's worried he might legitimately go crazy if he lets the silence go on for too long. "Crazier, I mean," he says. "I might go even crazier, if you can even imagine."

Cougar, lying next to him in the dark, looks at him steadily and gives him no reaction at all. 

Sometimes the look in Cougar's eyes reminds him of their landlady. Jensen assumes she has seen some shit in her life, not just because she's accepting lodgers with no identification and no records and no proof at all that they're not serial killers, but also because the lines in her face and the blank wall behind her eyes tell a story Jensen will never be able to guess. Cougar's too young for lines still, but Jensen can see where they'll start to come in by the way he sets his expression. Jensen reaches out to brush his thumb over the corner of Cougar's mouth, where the future lines will be, and tries to chase the blankness out of his face.

"You don't think I'm _that_ irritating, do you? I don't even know why she's so annoyed, she doesn't speak English so this probably just sounds like gibberish to her, it's background noise, she can just ignore it. And if she spent less time eavesdropping on us, she wouldn't hear me all the time."

No reply from Cougar, who barely even blinks.

Jensen thinks maybe he could use a little more from Cougar sometimes, but he also thinks if that's what he was looking for then he should've hitched his wagon to Pooch instead, or maybe even Clay.

"I'm just saying, _el fastidioso_ seems a bit harsh, especially since she didn't even consider calling me _el guapo_ first." 

That joke gets a smile from Cougar, at least. Satisfied, Jensen scooches in closer and tucks his nose into Cougar's neck to keep it warm. Cougar's eyes don't close, but Jensen tells himself it's okay. They've lived through worse, they can die through worse together.

*

It's Saturday afternoon and they're getting ready to go over to Pooch's for some late lunch or early dinner, some food to line their stomachs before they carpet bomb their digestive systems with the horrific brandy that the locals call _singani_. For Jensen, 'getting ready' just means finding the shirt that smells the least disgusting, but for Cougar it means putting some minor effort into taming his lanky hair into something resembling neatness. Their room is too cheap to have a bathroom of its own—all the occupants of the entire floor share one at the end of the hall. Jensen sits on the end of the bed and waits for Cougar to come back from wetting his comb and using it in front of the dingy, cracked mirror. 

That's when he first notices it. 

The little plastic head, perched on the ledge of the only window in their shabby little room. It's one of the dolls they're making at the factory this week, a model that looks like a realistic infant with painted facial features and short fuzzy hair rooted into the scalp by hand. This one's nose is slightly melted, though, scorch marks running down into its perfectly rosy lips. It wouldn't have passed quality inspection, would've been thrown away. Cougar must have taken it home.

Jensen turns it over and over in his palm. It looks dwarfed by his large hands, like one of those shrunken heads he read about in his scary chapter books when he was a kid. He has no idea why Cougar decided to keep it on their window ledge, but he isn't creeped out, even though he feels like maybe he should be. He's still holding it when Cougar returns from the bathroom, his hair slicked back and his beard trimmed neatly, looking so good that Jensen's mouth goes dry for a moment. Cougar shoots him a sidelong look like _he's_ the weird one for holding the broken toy, like he isn't just holding it because _Cougar_ , the _actual weirdo in this situation_ , brought it home in the first place.

He sets it aside when Cougar silently asks if he's ready to go with a quirk of his eyebrows, and in the haze of their subsequent night of debauchery Jensen forgets all about the doll head. 

He doesn't know when the next toy shows up, because he's too bone tired every night after work to do more than collapse into bed, maybe make a half-hearted attempt to slide his hands into Cougar's pants that doesn't go anywhere before they both fall asleep in exhaustion. There's no time and no energy to notice things. But then the week passes and it's Saturday again, and there are _two_ dolls' heads on the windowsill. 

The second one has its eyes painted all wrong, splatters of lumpy paint leaking out of the designated lines where they should go. It looks almost sinister, like it's literally weeping its own eyes out. Jensen digs it. 

Over the course of the next week or two, the couple of toys multiply into a collection that begins to overwhelm the tiny window ledge. It can only fit maybe ten at most, and when it runs out of room Cougar starts putting them on the floor underneath. It starts to look like a weird altar, some kind of strange voodoo dedicated to broken doll parts—badly made heads, disembodied torsos, an arm, a leg, a few scratched up toy cars when the factory takes an outsourcing contract from some cheap Hot Wheels knockoff, the empty skin of a stuffed dog that never got filled because whoever was in charge of sewing the legs on dropped the ball and attached five of them instead of four.

He never gets the chance to ask Cougar why he's doing this. It never feels like the right time, and when they have a moment to themselves where they aren't dead on their feet Jensen's too busy trying to make Cougar smile instead of thinking about the toys. He would never have thought it was possible, but Cougar is talking even less these days. He's not sure how there can be _less_ than none in the first place, but he swears he can sense a difference in the quality of his silence. The best he can get out of him these days is a smile, a chuckle if he works real hard, and Jensen's fucked if he doesn't grasp at what little Cougar can give him with the desperate hands of a starving man. Cougar's increasing unresponsiveness is driving Jensen batty, but he knows that however stir crazy he's going, it must be ten times worse in Cougar's head, so he tries to keep his shit to himself.

Anyway, that's his excuse for why he starts naming all the broken toys. 

He calls the first doll head, the one with the melted nose, "Eve," because she was the first one and he thinks he's being funny. Or poetic. Something. The biblical names theme goes on for a bit—there's a Daniel, a Jeremiah, a Mary, a Delilah, and a Rebecca—but Jensen wanders into more modern names soon enough. He's thinking of the kids his niece goes to school with, names he can remember from satellite phone conversations he hasn't had in too long. Hunter, Madison, Emma, Jackson, those kinds of names. 

Of course, he's almost done with thinking of names for all of them before he realizes that Bolivian toys should probably have Bolivian names. So then he has to go back and think of new names for all of them, and memorize which one is which all over again. He makes up stories about them to help him remember. Juan Carlos the five-legged flatdog wants to take Maria the pretty pair of legs out on a date, but she only has eyes for Jorge the car. Left to Jensen's imagination, their lives get as complicated as the telenovelas that their old battle-axe of a landlady watches on the only television set in the whole building. 

When Cougar stops bringing home new ones after the twenty-fifth toy, Jensen can't say he's surprised.

There were twenty-five kids on that helicopter they should've been on instead.

*

Jensen comes back from washing the day's grime and sweat off his body one Friday night and pauses at the sight of Cougar. He looks good, the curled ends of his hair still dripping from the shower that Jensen so graciously insisted he take first, no shirt on and bare toes curling against the dusty floor. He always looks good. But that's not why Jensen's staring. 

Cougar has the doll head with the bleeding eyes in his hands. He's just holding it, occasionally turning it with his fingers but mostly just cupping it in his palm. His face is blank, which is usual these days, and it's hard to tell from the distance of the door whether he's looking at the head or just into nothingness. Despite the fact that Cougar has obviously been bringing them home, this is the first time that Jensen has actually seen him touching one.

"That's Jimena," Jensen says.

Cougar looks up and raises an eyebrow.

"Her name," Jensen explains. "I've named them all. That's Jimena, that's Eva, Maria, Luis, Juan Carlos, Camila..." He rattles them all off one by one, pointing to each of them as he goes.

Somehow, this makes Cougar look even deader inside, which Jensen honestly did not think was possible. He fumbles around mentally for the newest story he's made up, anything to make Cougar smile. 

"Jimena and Camila are best friends, but they both like the same boy so it's causing some tension between them. It's been a few weeks since their last passive aggressive blowup that caused them to have to be separated—that's why Jimena has been staying on the ledge even though Camila's cozying up to their crush on the floor. The thing is, though, she misses her. They miss each other. They've been best friends for ten years and they probably love each other more than anything in the world. So eventually they're going to figure out, you know, ladybros before hoes, and they're going to patch things up. Or they're going to solve it by having a threesome. Yeah. Probably that."

Cougar finally does smile then, lopsided but Jensen would argue it counts. He sets Jimena back down—on the floor next to Camila, Jensen notices, and not back on the windowsill. And then he beckons Jensen closer. Jensen goes too quickly, too eagerly, but Cougar doesn’t seem to mind. He looks an arm around Jensen's neck and draws him into a kiss. 

Jensen is aware that on some level this is a pity kiss. He sees how hard Jensen is trying and wants to give him something in return for that story. And Jensen isn't too proud to take it. Not even close. Mostly, he's just relieved as fuck—relieved to finally get some attention and affection, and relieved that Cougar is still capable of giving it because that means he's not so far gone yet that Jensen can't bring him back.

He presses forward into Cougar's mouth, presses him back and down into their shitty uncomfortable bed with the scratchy sheets and the thin blanket that's still too hot for this humid fucking hellhole half the time. Cougar lets himself sink into the bed, and Jensen knows he's willing to go along with this because if he really didn't want to, Jensen wouldn't be able to budge him.

It doesn't take Jensen long to get them naked, what with Cougar already halfway there to begin with. He dumps his own t-shirt and boxers over the side of the bed, uncaring of where they land, and crawls up Cougar's body. Their skin is still damp from their showers and it provides just enough of a slide to make lower his hips to Cougar's feel real good. 

He grinds against Cougar for a bit, the drag of their cocks against each other so good but also not quite enough. He angles his hips so he can thrust better, get their sloppy wet cocks up against each other's abdomens for more friction, and god, it feels like home finally, but then he looks at Cougar's face and Cougar doesn't have his eyes closed and he isn't looking at him. His head is turned to the side, and he's staring unblinkingly at the collection of broken toys.

"Oh no you don't," Jensen growls, grabbing Cougar's chin and turning his head back towards him. He should be looking at Jensen and nothing else—Jensen, who never sees anything but him, every minute of every day. Jensen crushes their mouths together, open and panting and full of teeth. Cougar isn't allowed to look at anything else, he's not allowed to think about anything besides Jensen, who has been so patiently waiting for him. Jensen will make sure of it.

He slides down Cougar's body until his eyes are level with Cougar's uncut cock, thick and smeared with Jensen's own precum. He leans forward to tongue at his foreskin until Cougar whines quietly in the back of his throat, and then he wraps a hand around his cock and pulls the skin down to reveal the flushed purple head, just perfect for his mouth. It's leaking, and it trails wetness across Jensen's tongue when he goes down.

Jensen takes him as deep as he can go, moaning around him as his cock fills him. His jaw starts aching before long and he can barely breathe, and it's fucking perfect, everything he's ever wanted. He knows from the involuntary sounds being pulled out of Cougar that he's definitely present in the moment, has absolutely nothing in his mind besides the tightness of Jensen's mouth all around him. When Jensen pulls back to catch a deeper breath, Cougar's hips chase him upward, trying to stay in that beautiful heat. 

Jensen draws his tongue down that beautiful cock he loves so much, licking at Cougar's balls, and the strangled yelp that's drawn from Cougar makes Jensen suddenly hyper aware of how hard he himself is. Cougar's almost there, just barely holding on, and Jensen isn't much farther behind from nothing more than the feel of Cougar fucking in and out of his mouth. He reaches for his own dick, pumping it in time to Cougar's rhythm, and then they're falling over the edge together. 

Later, after they've cleaned themselves up again, Jensen lies next to Cougar and feels the weight of his silent gaze back on the toys. He holds Cougar's by the shoulders and rolls them so that Jensen is on the outside of the bed, not his usual side but blocking Cougar's view. Cougar says nothing, but lets him. Jensen's too fucked out to stay awake watching Cougar, but for once before his eyes close he can see that Cougar's are already shut.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my lovely recipient, sphinxvictorian. I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for a great Yuletide experience, and thanks to everyone for reading.


End file.
